SPOTLIGHT: Ax turns out to be Lincoln's last swing

Friday

Feb 22, 2008 at 12:01 AMFeb 22, 2008 at 10:17 PM

Historians figure Abraham Lincoln was showing off on April 8, 1865, when, at the end of a long day, he spotted an ax at a Union Army field hospital in Virginia. He’d spent hours shaking hands with thousands of wounded soldiers. A doctor told him his arm was surely tired. Holding his arm straight out, Lincoln picked up the ax by the butt, with the handle parallel to the ground, and held the seven-pound tool motionless. He was 56 years old — and one week away from assassination.

Bruce Rushton

Historians figure Abraham Lincoln was showing off on April 8, 1865, when, at the end of a long day, he spotted an ax at a Union Army field hospital in Virginia. He’d spent hours shaking hands with thousands of wounded soldiers. A doctor told him his arm was surely tired.

Holding his arm straight out, Lincoln picked up the ax by the butt, with the handle parallel to the ground, and held the seven-pound tool motionless. He was 56 years old — and one week away from assassination.

“Strong men who looked on — men accustomed to manual labor — could not hold the same ax in that position for a moment,” wrote Francis Fisher Browne, a Union soldier who authored a biography called “The Every-Day Life of Abraham Lincoln.”

Lincoln also went to work chopping a log, historians say. According to Browne, someone saved the chips.

Now, 143 years later, the same ax has turned up at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

The state of Illinois, it turns out, has owned the ax since 1955, when it was donated to the Lincoln Home, then the state’s responsibility. It was accompanied by an affidavit from the director of the field hospital, plus a second statement signed in 1914, verifying the tool’s authenticity.

Historians at the library and museum only recently stumbled across the paperwork while going through boxes. Until then, they figured the rusting relic was a phony, just like every other supposed Lincoln ax they’d ever come across.

“We’ve had the ax, and we’ve had the affidavit,” said James Cornelius, library curator. “We didn’t know that they went together.”

Now, researchers are handling the ax with white gloves and talking about displaying it in a glass case, temperature and humidity controlled.

The ax made its public debut a week ago on “Fox and Friends” in New York, where the Fox Network paid for a Pinkerton guard to protect it (plus a stovepipe hat and a fan owned by Mrs. Lincoln) while it wasn’t on television.

The last ax used by The Railsplitter also may be the only ax in the world that can be tied so closely to Lincoln, museum officials say.

The Smithsonian Institution has an ax that purportedly was used by Lincoln, Cornelius said, but its provenance isn’t as certain as the one in Springfield. Besides physical characteristics — markings on the ax prove it was made in Pennsylvania during or before the Civil War — the ax donated to the state had been in the same family from the time Lincoln used it until it was given to the Lincoln Home, Cornelius said.

Along with the paperwork documenting the ax’s authenticity, researchers have found a 1955 letter from Richard Hagen, who worked for the state Parks and Memorials Division when a woman named Mrs. A. Clement Wild gave the ax to the home.
“Since the ax properly belongs in that period of Lincoln’s life after he left Springfield, we would not feel that there would be a proper place for it within the house itself,” Hagen wrote.

Rather than give the ax back, the Lincoln Home sent it to the state historical library. Eventually, the ax ended up in a vault at the presidential library and museum, which is now documenting artifacts, especially ones donated before 1958, when the historical library hired its first curator. Before then, library employees typically inventoried items by writing descriptions on index cards that often ended up in different places than the artifacts, Cornelius said.

The ax’s tag now reads “LR283 Ax which Lincoln held out straight.”

Holding an ax at arm’s length was a trick Lincoln used to perform at county fairs in Illinois, Cornelius said.

But the stunt had consequences on April 8, 1865. After chopping wood at the hospital, Lincoln spent the night with Mary Todd on a ship. There, he reportedly told his wife, his arm really did hurt.

“Almost everything associated with Lincoln has a story,” Cornelius said. “This one has a great story.”

Bruce Rushton can be reached at (217) 788-1542.

So what’s the ax worth?

That depends.

James Cornelius, curator for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, said he can’t put a price on an ax used by Lincoln. With nothing comparable on the market, he said, it’s worth whatever someone is willing to pay, and prices for Lincoln artifacts fluctuate. In general, though, prices have gone up.

Daniel Weinberg, owner of the Abraham Lincoln Book Store in Chicago, said it’s difficult to set a price without seeing an object, but the ax could fetch as little as $5,000 or as much as $15,000.

However, Lincoln relics have skyrocketed in worth since the ax was donated to the state in 1955.

In 2002, a letter from Lincoln fetched $799,500 at auction. The letter was one of 842 lots of documents and relics purchased in 1952 for a total of $273,632, the Boston Globe reported in 2003. The record at the time for a Lincoln artifact was $424,000 for a pair of opera glasses the 16th president brought to Ford’s Theater. The glasses had been purchased for $24,000 in 1979.

In April, Sotheby’s auction house is scheduled to auction off 22 Lincoln documents. Pre-auction valuations range from $3,500 to $5,000 for a legal document signed by Lincoln in 1851 to $3 million to $5 million for a 1864 letter from Lincoln in response to a petition he received from schoolchildren who asked him to free slave children.

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